U.S.
Corporations Arrive for the Feast

After twenty-five years of
fighting the Japanese, the Dutch and the U.S. colonialists, and after having
begun a program of virtual expropriation of some of the foreign holdings of
Indonesia's natural wealth, the country was again opened to outright colonial
exploitation.

The 1965 coup and the subsequent slaughter of the anti-colonialists
smoothed the way for many U.S. companies to come back during 1966. But it was
not until January 1967 after the generals' clique was firmly consolidated, that
the "foreign investments law" was passed. This law opened the door
legally, as well as politically and militarily, to the foreign plunderers. It
specifically guaranteed all U.S. investors against losses due to "war,
revolution or insurrection."

This, of course, was what the coup was really all about. Stories about "natives
running amok" and "religious Javanese" being "shocked by
Communist atheism" were planted in the cynical U.S. and world imperialist
press to cover up what was simply a drive by the U.S. master-butchers to get
their plantations, oil wells, banks and mines back -- with interest.

The coup did give them the bonus of political control over a tremendous
section of the South Pacific and another wedge into Southeast Asia, and this was
fundamental for the long-range interest of U.S. imperialism as a whole. But U.S.
big business, which so directly influences Washington, is also noted for its
pragmatism -- for keeping its eye on the ball of immediate profit. And there was
plenty of profit to be made in Indonesia, once the Sukarno government, the
Communists and the revolutionary nationalists were defeated.

The familiar old robbers are now back at the feast. Unilever, the U.S. and
British makers of Palmolive and Lux, have two soap and edible fat plants in the
islands and drain off most of the palm oil to fatten their own profits.
Uniroyal, another U.S. international giant (formerly United States Rubber), has
a 54,000-acre rubber plantation and a latex plant in Java. Union Carbide, Singer
Sewing Machine and National Cash Register have gotten their properties back.

But the U.S. penetration has redoubled since the coup and shows signs of
being stepped up far higher in the light of the open door it has achieved by the
coup. Now Eastern Airlines has got in to share the profits with Garuda
(Indonesian) Airlines; Mobil Oil has secured oil exploration rights for 450,000
acres on Sumatra as well as purchase of the already existing Asamera Oil
Company. Freeport Sulphur recently got a $75 million contract for exploiting
West Irian copper. It paid a sum equal to about 70 cents for each Indonesian for
the privilege.

Freeport explored West Irian for copper in 1968 and from its ore samples
concluded there was about 4 per cent copper in the ore. This is almost 20 times
as rich as ores now found in Arizona and Utah, where the copper companies have
been making profits for years. The copper deposits in the West Irian area alone
are estimated at over 33 million tons. At 20 cents a pound (refined copper has
been selling from 50 to 70 cents a pound wholesale this year), the total value
of this find would be equal to about $1,000 for every man, woman and child in
Indonesia. (The Indonesian per capita income is $82 a year.)

But copper is only a small part of the tremendous natural wealth of the
country. Indonesia is considered to be the fifth richest country in the world in
natural resources. U.S. Steel expects to get 20,000 tons of nickel a year from
West Irian and Wago Island, plus an unstated amount of valuable cobalt as a "by-product."
International Nickel hopes to get an equal amount, and a Japanese company now
expects to find 50 million tons of the stuff. (Japanese imperialism, which
killed so many U.S. -- and Japanese -- youths in 1941-45 shares the feast with
U.S. imperialism which has practically invited its former enemy to the table in
order to keep it from challenging other U.S. interests.)

How do the Indonesian masses receive these companies when they enter or
reenter the islands? Do the people welcome them as benevolent "developers"
of their land?

Not exactly.

Twenty years ago, the infamous Alfred Krupp, the most powerful financial
backer of the Hitler regime, was convicted and condemned at Nuremberg for one of
the most hated of all the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis -- the use of
concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers in the plants and mines belonging
to the corporate backers of German fascism.

That was in 1947.

On February 19, 1967, at 6:30 p.m. an ominous replica of the grim World War
II newsreels flashed briefly across the television screen during a nationwide
broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company.

The narrator of the NBC Sunday documentary, referring to the picture on the
screen, described a group of workers bent over in a field under the watchful
eyes of armed soldiers. The time was just previous to the broadcast. The place
was Indonesia. The workers were prisoners of the U.S.-backed Indonesian Army and
the rubber plantation on which they were working was recently returned to the
Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

The narrator explained the scene:

Bad as things are in Indonesia, one positive fact is
known. Indonesia has a fabulous potential wealth in natural resources and the
New Order [the fascist regime headed by pro-U.S. General Suharto] wants it
exploited. So they are returning the private properties expropriated by
Sukarno's regime. Goodyear's Sumatran rubber empire is an example. It was seized
[by the rubber workers] in retaliation for U.S. aggression in Vietnam in 1965.
The rubber workers union was Communist-run, so after the coup many of them were
killed or imprisoned. Some of the survivors, you see them here, still work the
rubber -- but this time as prisoners, and at gunpoint.

As the
commentator described the crime depicted on the screen, the tone of condemnation
associated with Nuremberg was entirely missing. In its place was a definite
sense of grim triumph! The narration continued:

The New Order wants Goodyear back. They, like dozens of
other foreign capitalists, are anxious to return because the wealth is there --
not just rubber, but oil, tin, lumber, spices, almost everything.

The scene, as brief as it was ghastly, was sandwiched into a vicious, hour-long
anti-Communist propaganda film worthy of Goebbels. NBC designed the film as an
introduction for the U.S. population to the "New Order" in Indonesia
-- the CIA-inspired military usurpers who have ruled the country by terror since
the coup of October 1, 1965.

Although the film completely covered up the role of the U.S. in the
Indonesian massacre of a million people, nevertheless the quick shot of slaves
working on the Goodyear plantation at gunpoint was highly significant. At one
and the same time, it revealed the thoroughly fascist character of the pro-U.S.
regime in Djakarta, clearly implicated the prime mover behind the
counter-revolution (the U.S. monopolies), and dramatized the fundamental
objective of Washington's long standing policy in Indonesia (and all Asia) --
the enslavement of the oppressed for the benefit of U.S. big business.

In keeping with the general line of U.S. propaganda on Indonesian events,
NBC tried to depict the bloody victory of the reactionary officer corps as an
unlooked-for gift which dropped unexpectedly into the lap of Washington.

The narrator deliberately omitted the fact that the soldiers holding the
guns on the Goodyear plantation slaves were under orders from All-Sumatran
Defense Commander Lieutenant-General Achmad Junus Mokoginta who was graduated
from the United States Army Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Nor was it mentioned that Mokoginta is under the discipline of the
Indonesian High Command in Djakarta, which the U.S. spent $53 million to "train"
from 1952 to 1965. (The $53 million is a public figure. CIA disbursements are
classified.)

When it was baldly stated by U.S. news managers that the "New Order
wants Goodyear back," this was very true. But what was concealed, for fear
of uncovering Washington's primary role in the massacre of a million people, is
that the Suharto regime is a hired creation of the U.S. government and "wants"
only what it is paid to want.

POLITICAL PRISONERS "DYING LIKE FLIES"

Alex Campbell, managing editor of theNew Republic, got a glimpse
of the New Order when he visited Indonesia in the spring of 1969. Conditions
hadn't changed much since the NBC documentary.

The government plans to send some 60,000 (political
prisoners) to forced labor on rubber plantations in Borneo. Perhaps 10,000 have
already gone there. They are said to be dying like flies. Meanwhile those still
in the camps may be slowly dying of starvation....

Many of those plantations are property of the U.S. Rubber Company and
Goodyear.

All Indonesians have to carry identification cards that
contain information about race, religion and occupation. The cards of the
relatives of political detainees bear in addition a warning that they are
suspected of having Communist sympathies. This usually means that they are
refused jobs, or that they soon lose the jobs they have.... The punishment of
the children is to be refused admission to schools.... Meanwhile, new suspects
continue to be arrested and put in prison or otherwise disposed of....

The
authorities recently pounced on a poverty-stricken area in central Java,
encircled it with troops and then carted off some hundreds or perhaps thousands
of persons who were charged with planning another armed uprising....

Campbell also described the life style of one of the generals who became the
head of Pertamina, the state oil and mining monopoly, after the coup.

The critics of General Sutowo say that a good deal of the
oil money is already finding its way into his own treasury. His daughter's
costly wedding was the talk of Djakarta in March. It continued for days, there
were thousands of guests, and the general had closed-circuit television
installed into his huge home, as the only way by which he could watch the entire
proceedings. The father of the groom artlessly exclaimed, "I did not
realize my son was marrying a princess!"

General Sutowo is
living the life of a racketeer who has the "protection" of even more
powerful bandits -- the U.S. Seventh Fleet. He earned his payoff by opening
Indonesia up to U.S. oil companies. But his fabulous extravagance -- by
Indonesian standards -- is peanuts compared with the fortunes being amassed by
American oil speculators.

The Suharto regime has thrown open thousands of square miles of offshore
oil fields to foreign exploitation. Atlantic Richfield, Phillips, Mobil Oil,
Union Carbide, Tenneco and a Japanese and an Italian company all came in to work
this bonanza.

A share of the Natomas Company, a U.S. company mining Indonesian oil, was
listed on the New York Stock Exchange for $16 in 1968. By the summer of 1969,
when stock prices generally were slumping to new lows, Natomas had soared to
$114.

Alcoa, the great U.S. aluminum monopoly (Aluminum Corporation of America),
the preserve of the fabulously wealthy Mellons of Pittsburgh, is ransacking the
whole Indonesian archipelago for bauxite (aluminum ore) and intends to dig mines
and build refineries as it has done in Africa, Australia and America. So lush
are the prospects for this lushest of companies that it expects to spend no less
than $100 million in exploration and initial installations of equipment. And the
resulting "investment" will be simply the means for transferring
Indonesia's aluminum wealth into the coffers of Pittsburgh and Wall Street
banks. "The agreement (between Alcoa and the puppet generals) provides for
one of the biggest single investments in Indonesia outside of long term oil
operations," said the Associated Press in March, 1969.

With Chase Manhattan being the generals' "friend" in Djakarta and
with Holiday Inns taking over Sukarno's presidential palace, it is hardly
surprising that imperialism's most suave and presently successful salesman,
Richard M. Nixon himself, sat down to dinner with his butcher-assistant General
Suharto in July of 1969 and applauded him amid the cheers and approval of the
U.S. press.

"Indonesia is the great prize of American diplomacy in Asia,"
wrote New York Times reporter Max Frankel from Djakarta right after the
Nixon-Suharto dinner. And he added that during the bash, Nixon was "cheerfully
rattling off statistics of Indonesia's economic potential, soaking up the cheers
of the crowd and offering tributes to independence and democracy."

While no Times man could possibly have written these words without smiling
to himself or drowning his cynicism in liquor, he did nevertheless let slip one
piece of real information when he used the word "prize" in relation to
the 110 million-strong country. Since when is a "prize" -- a piece of
booty -- independent? By his choice of words, the Times man betrayed his utter
contempt for Nixon's puppet allies.

Yes. Indonesia is today a "democracy" where hundreds of thousands
of political prisoners face slow death, where power was seized by a handful of
corrupt military men who wiped out the mass organizations, executed or jailed
every member of Sukarno's cabinet, discarded the constitution and keep the
President under house arrest; it is an "independent" regime that is
auctioning off its people and natural resources to the lords of international
finance.

Nixon considers Indonesia a model country now, and points to its violent
anti-communist turn as a redeeming effect of the U.S. war against Viet Nam. He
is trying to console the banks and corporations that have "lost" Viet
Nam with the prospect of Indonesia's untold wealth and 110 million people who
will work for starvation wages.

Nixon talked about Indonesia's "strategic geographical significance
and enormous if unrealized economic potential." At one point he turned to
General Suharto, who usurped the Presidency, and said, "The people of the
United States wish to share with you in this adventure in progress."

Actually, the Yankees have already begun arriving in Djakarta to nail down
their "share" of the "prize." These just plain folks are the
representatives of Sinclair Oil, Freeport Sulphur, U.S. Rubber, Eastern
Airlines, Chase Manhattan Bank and scores of other U.S. corporations that thrive
on the "independence and democracy" spawned by fascist butchery.

U.S. "aid" had of course been scaled down considerably during
Sukarno's shift toward complete nationalization of U.S. companies. And as we
pointed out, Washington restricted itself mostly to aiding the generals and the
extreme right wing so as to get back into the country with its previous
money-making machinery for Wall Street.

It can be said categorically that all U.S. aid to any country whatsoever is
given with the aim of getting profits for U.S. big business in one way or
another. Sometimes, it is more sophisticated and indirect, as in the case of
Yugoslavia and Rumania, where the benefits to U.S. capital are more diffused,
less defined and not of animmediate monetary character.
Marshall Plan aid was of a dual character, that is, it helped keep Europe from
communism by keeping it on a kind of dole, and it also gave enormous orders to
U.S. industry to send goods to Europe.

By and large the "aid" is directly connected with the process of
funneling back the wealth of the "aided" country to the treasuries of
the United States capitalists. Thus a U.S.-built railroad to the middle of
Africa becomes an instrument to bring the products of the interior to the
seashore. And a modern U.S.-built mechanized dock at the shore becomes the means
of transferring those products to the holds of U.S. ships.

Railroads and docks are not in and of themselves a bad thing. In fact they
are essential to modern living. They make human labor far more productive. And
every underdeveloped country wants to have its share of them and a lot of other
machinery, too. But when some other country owns the plantations which send
their goods to the docks on the railroads, when that same foreign country owns
the mines which load their precious metals on the railroads, and the factories
which pile their commodities on the railroads, then the whole population of the
host country is only robbed that much more systematically and efficiently by the
country which "aided" the colony with modern machinery.

When Sukarno said to the U.S. Ambassador sometime in 1965 -- before the
coup -- "To hell with your aid!" he really meant: "To hell with
your attempts to make us your colony!" The U.S. reactionaries who are
always preaching against sending "aid" to foreign countries, at the
time revealed the demagogic, lying character of their position when they failed
to make very much noise about Sukarno's defiance or compliment him for being
independent and self-reliant!

HOW U.S. "AID" WORKED

The former Ambassador of Indonesia to Cuba, A.M. Hanafi, wrote in a Letter
to the American People, sent in care of YAWF and published in the Partisan, Vol.
3, No. 2, a short explanation of how this "aid" from imperialism
worked in the case of Indonesia:

Some time ago, as a member of the International Monetary
Fund, Indonesia was offered credit under the Marshall Plan. With that credit we
had to buy, directly or indirectly, a lot of American products.

This in
itself was no great cause for regret, but what happened after we got those
millions of dollars credit? There was a steady and ever-increasing inflation
which, cyclically, caused an even greater need for more credit, and so on, until
an extremely embarrassing situation was reached. The "textbook thinker"
of the Indonesian Government agreed, following the advice of the administrators
of the International Monetary Fund, to invite Hjalmar Schacht, one of Hitler's
top economists, to advise us how to get out of our financial difficulties. This
was done, over the protest of the mass organizations, and the black market for
dollars soared to fantastic heights.

It was said that Government officials were corrupt, but I think that Mr.
Bill Palmer and certain officials of the U.S. Embassy in Djakarta knew far
better even than President Sukarno who among the Indonesians were corruptible
and who were not. And who, you may ask, is Mr. Bill Palmer? As the Chief of the
American Moving Picture Association in Indonesia (AMPAI), he used his ostensible
position as a distributor of movies being shown in theaters throughout the
nation to control millions upon millions of rupiahs in daily circulation. After
some time we smelled a rat and suspected that he was one of the CIA's agents in
Indonesia.

As a result, in 1965 the revolutionary youth and the police raided his
mountain home in Tjipajung, some 45 miles from Djakarta; they found CIA
documents and other evidence that Palmer was the head of a network of
counterrevolutionaries. The AMPAI was then taken over by the Government, the
importation of movies from the United States was ordered stopped, and Bill
Palmer was sent home. Adam Malik, then Minister of Trade, however, managed to
continue to bring in American movies. It should be stated that our attempt to
block these movies was not based on any anti-American feelings, but rather grew
from our experience that everything that emanated from the United States was
being used as a basis for subversive activity.

I have learned, too, from my own experience, exactly what U.S. credit
means. I learned this while serving as Minister for People's Mobilization for
Development, from 1957 to 1959. The United States offered us $350 million in
credit -- in installments, and with many strings attached, some explicit and
others implicit. Among other things, the United States demanded that three
Cabinet Ministers be replaced -- Minister of Information Sudibjo, Minister of
Veterans' Affairs Chaerul Saleh, and I. President Sukarno asked me to resign "in
the interests of the nation," and I told him yes, I would gladly be an
ordinary citizen again if the credit of $350 million were dependent on my exit
from the Cabinet. I was willing to resign, I said, even without any political
reasons, but it might be difficult to explain my resignation to the people,
because everyone knew that the decisions I had made as Minister had benefitted
the country.

But I had had enough, and I didn't want to be involved in any more
political compromises. (As an aside, it may interest you to know that when
President Sukarno formed his new Cabinet it was even more opposed to U.S.
intervention than the old one had been, and included two top Communist leaders,
Aidit and Njoto.) But why did the United States give such importance to our
resignations? We three were strongly opposed to a new law on mining investments
which was detrimental to Indonesia's best interests but favored those of the
United States.

So I think, dear friends, it is very understandable that, after we had
uncovered many instances of U.S. subversive activities in Indonesia in the
economic and political spheres, President Sukarno took a firm stand and told the
United States where it could go with its aid. Unfortunately, Sukarno has had to
pay for his courage, and with the counter-revolutionary coup d'etat that was
effected by Nasution and Suharto and their fascists the idea of military junta
which was first envisioned by the counter-revolutionary traitors of
PRRI/PERMESTA was realized.